The Crown Jewel of Luxury Retail - Orient Crown

23 Apr 2018

StaffOnDemand

General,HR

Established in 2010, Orient Crown have carved a distinctive niche in the luxury retail space through its unique merchandise range of watch winders.

In this exclusive interview, we go behind the scenes with Orient Crown's co-founder, Waleed Abumazen, on what it takes to grow an upscale retail brand and the thoughts that go behind the hiring strategy for a dedicated workforce for the growing firm.

The Why – Creation of a unique brand proposition

The founders started Orient Crown in Singapore with a focus on providing discerning consumers with a range of high quality watch winders that can preserve the quality of automatic watchpieces by winding them while they are in storage.

The Unbridled Growth of a Homegrown Luxury Label

Fuelled by the parallel growth of growing demand for luxury watchpieces, Orient Crown grew steadily as a brand of choice, with its watch winders synonymous with the perfect meld of functionality and design.

Over a short span of 8 years, Orient Crown expanded quickly across Singapore's premier shopping locations such as Marina Bay Sands and Takashimaya and have now set its sights across the region, with the planned opening of its concept stores in Jakarta and Dubai by end 2018.

In 2019, Orient Crown will be launching their flagship outlet in JEWEL Changi Airport, showcasing to the world as one of the premium luxury retailers that have made its mark on the world stage.

What is the most important aspect or core values, that Orient Crown's staff need to have?

In Orient Crown we believe in team work, integrity and delivering unparalleled white glove service. Our retail associates are our firm’s first and foremost impression for our clients, and it is critical for us as a company to ensure that we get the right talents to join us.

Why makes the role of an retail associate unique at Orient Crown?

At Orient Crown, we offer long-term and fulfilling careers for our team members and have crafted a flexible talent programme to groom our retail sales team and nurture them to take on leadership roles in our firm. Our regional growth also enables us to provide overseas travel and work opportunities to our team members, and learn the intricacies of high-end luxury retail.

We are privileged to have the patronage of a large number of distinguished and celebrity clients from all over the world, and we take pride that we provide extensive training for our retail associates to ensure that they are able to provide white-glove service to our esteemed clients.

Scaling up the company fast to accompany its rapid pace of growth was no easy feat. Orient Crown, as an astute SME, chose StaffOnDemand as its recruitment management partner from its early days for the following reasons:

Ease of Use

The recruitment management platform provided an easy way for Orient Crown’s management to have an instant overview of all active recruitment activity. As the platform was built to be intuitively simple, the management and HR team could utilize the system, right out of the box, and start hiring from day one.

Employer Branding

As a relatively young brand, employer branding was key to driving the talent attraction process. Orient Crown worked extensively with StaffOnDemand to manage the brand image on its career portal, as well as deliver the brand message and career opportunities to jobseekers looking to join the luxury retail industry through the various social media and online channels.

Management of Candidate Information

As the career opportunities grew, the volume of applications rose exponentially. This was a growing headache for Waleed and his team, as it was difficult to manage the stream of candidate data information through email. With StaffOnDemand, candidate data information is kept secure, and the Orient Crown team can focus on assessing the applications quickly to suss out their next great hire.